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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].
You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the [http://mailman.laptop.org/mailman/listinfo/community-news laptop.org mailman site].


=Laptop News 2007-11-03=
=Laptop News 2007-11-10=
1. Cambridge: The first of the monthly learning workshops was held at OLPC this week. More than 60 people from 14 countries (and one US city) attended. The focus of this workshop was to build a stronger understanding of laptops and learning; to make plans for deployment in the countries; and to build a strong community among the participants for ongoing support and collaboration. The energy, ideas, and excitement among the group was fantastic and gave everyone more hope about the learning potential about to be unleashed as laptops begin arriving in large numbers in countries shortly. Many thanks to David Cavallo, Lindsay Petrillose, and the OLPC learning team for all of their efforts.
1. Reggio Emilia: Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi reconfirmed his commitment of 50,000 laptops for Ethiopia while at a town meeting of over 600 people where Nicholas presented OLPC. The importance of the funding is its exemplary nature—it is a model for other European countries and the EU itself to follow. The clarity with which both the press and the audience understood children as our mission, versus a market, was refreshing.


2. Cyberspace: Larry Weber’s dream of a digital PSA has been realized: Hilary Meserole reports that our first Give One Get One public service announcement, which features Heroes star Masi Oka, is online (See [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQbtebeftyA]). The team is working with YouTube on ways to feature this on their home page during the fortnight that the campaign is running. We will be adding more content next week—outtakes from the PSA shoot, etc.
2. Rome: Nicholas joined Antonio Battro and Matt Keller for a whirlwind one-day tour of the Eternal City. The day started with an interview on Radio Vatican, followed by an address to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN, a speech received by over 200 UN staffers. After meeting with members of the City of Florence Council, Nicholas addressed over 300 members of Catholic Orders at the Vatican. (The Catholic Orders educate 50-million children in schools worldwide, many in the poorest countries.) The event, organized by Matt and Tom Rocheford of the Jesuit order included a presentation by Cardinal Poupard on the Encyclica “Populorum Progressio” as a mission towards education in developing countries and Antonio introduced the fundamental principles of OLPC. Throughout the day, they were shadowed by a Time Magazine reporter (See [http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1678273,00.html]).


Masi has joined OLPC as our media spokesperson, however, an ill-timed writers' strike precludes Nicholas and Masi doing some of the talk-show appearances that had been envisioned.
3. New York City: Nicholas gave the keynote address at the 10th anniversary of Mouse.org, accompanied by Chancellor Joel Klein of the NYC public school system. Mouse is working with OLPC and, among other things, will help document the XO. Mouse is an organization that has students who helps other students (and teachers and schools) run their computer systems.


3. Give One Get One launches at 6AM EST on Monday (See laptopgiving.org). While we have no idea what the response will be, Hilary and the “volunteer army” that includes Pentagram, Nurun, W2, Racepoint, Digital Influence Group, Eleven, Inc., and Len Fink did a fantastic job raising the public awareness of the campaign. Examples include the beautiful full-page ad that was donated by the Economist (See [[:Image:GiveOneGetOne.pdf]]). We will be able to reach many more children due to their efforts.
4. Cambridge: The first of what will become monthly learning workshops will be held this coming week; attendees are coming from the countries expecting to launch in the coming weeks and months. Lindsay Petrillose has done a fantastic job organizing all aspects of the meeting.


4. Mass production started this week this week in Quanta's new factory in Changshu. We would like to take this time to thank the team at Quanta for there support over the last two years. Major contributors to the effort include: Victor Chao, Gary Chiang, Arnold Kao, Matt Huang, Dandy Hsu, Agnes Huang, Johnson Huang, Frank Lee, Roger Huang, Elvis Wu, S.F. Chen, Ken Lin, Jacky Mu, Paying Liu, Terry Su, Alfred Lin, Gary Chiang, Alice Wang, Alan Lio, Jeff Tarng, Tim Huang, Jeffrey Huang, Rita Chen, Joe Lin, Jeff Yu, Ben Chuang, Sam Yeh, Johnnie Lui, Eric Tasi, Bruce Lu, Jeff Huang, Mikko Hsu, Vance Ke, Luna Huang, David Lin, Bryan Ma, Devin Lui, Arvin Lui, John Lin, Tess Yu, Chia Ying Lin, Gary Su, C.H. Yang, Ray Tseng, Sam Chang, Gary Liu, Lori Yang, Frank Feng, Cooper Zhou, Kaiser Feng, Neptune Zhan, Xiang Wei, Zihaw Zhang, Min Xia, Eagle Liang, Peter Huang, Pillar Hou, Yaya Zhang, Crystal Sun, Nana Pei, Bob Zhang, Yengeng Cen, Ian Huang, Chie-Hung Li, Sunny Cheng, Cancer Zha, Fly Chen, Javin Hu, Grubby Wei, Polin Chang, Anna Zhou, Tim Huang, Jim Chang, Eric Wang, Kenny Chung, Zenith Zhu, Rock Chien, Sunny Hsiung, Kiki Peng, Sunny Huang, Barry Lam, Michael Wang, Morse Chen, and Eddy Chao.
5. Mass production (MP): John Watlington continued to chase down our remaining suspend/resume problems. Many tests were tried, with most of them failing to cause any laptop crashes. (We now only see very rare crashes upon resume.) A production-line test for suspend/resume was developed and tested. The kernel and firmware teams have been invaluable in supporting this testing process.


There are many other people—from companies such as Marvel, ChiLin, Himax, CMO, AMD, ENE, QMI, Fuse Project, Gecko, Pentagram, Design Continuum, Foxconn, ALPS, and MIT, and many individuals as well—who have contributed to the hardware and mechanicals over the past three years. (Mary Lou Jepsen is pulling together a list of everyone to thank.) Collectively we have achieved something that just three years ago many believed that was an impossible dream.
Richard Smith has arrived in Changshu to continue testing the C2 motherboard and provide support the first days of production while John returns to Cambridge with a batch of motherboards for more intensive hardware analysis. Another batch is going to Terry Su (Quanta) in Taiwan for parallel debugging. Mary Lou Jepsen, Richard, Arnold Kao, Gary Chiang, and Matt Huang are in Changshu right now. Chris Ball is already back.


5. Safety Certification: Behind the scenes another team (from UL, Quanta, and OLPC) has been quietly working for nearly two years on XO safety certification. The XO laptop is now fully compliant with UL safety requirements and has been thus certified. We have also been awarded radio, power, and system certification at national levels in several countries. We can now legally ship in US, Canada, Uruguay, and Peru, as well as many other countries. EU-wide approval is due in approximately a week. We are still in the process of applying for certification in countries on each continent with the most stringent safety standards.
This unusual level of testing is due to our quest for an extraordinarily robust laptop with extraordinary low power consumption.


Among many tests, we have passed Ul/IEC 60950-1 (notebook computer), ASTM F693 (electronic toys for children), UL 1301 (mechanical assembly requirements, including larger face dimension requirements for child safety) and UL 2054 (batteries), as well as a passing UL on-site inspection of the Quanta's factory. We have formal RoHS (low toxicity) certification from Quanta, and independent testing of RoHS compliance by UL. Also, we have been safety approved for lap use—XO is the first “laptop” approved for usage on one's lap in many years. (The reason that most laptops are now called “notebook computers” is that they run too hot for safe lap use.)
Regarding mechanical, this weekend, among other things, we are fixing a cosmetic blemish on the left and right hand side keyboard-base green “bumpers.” The tooling is being modified presently. Other work includes online manufacturer-server setup and testing plans, fulfillment reporting, logistics, etc.


Many thanks to the core XO safety teams from UL, Quanta, and OLPC: Katherine Sims, Bob Delisi, Nicole Tatum, Kevin Ravi, Stacy Yu, Tom Burke, Derek Chen, Edgar Wolff-klammer, Tammi Gengegbacher, Greg Monty, Alfred Fung, Nicholas Boten, Seth Carlton, Bruce Lu, Kenny Chung, Victor Chao, Rita Chen, Arnold Kao, Mary Lou Jepsen, and Lindsay Petrillose.
6. Embedded controller (EC): Richard finally figured out what was going on with the NiMH batteries in secure-boot mode. API differences between the EC commands and Open Firmware. This was fixed in Q2D03.


6. Richard Smith has been setting up a suspend/resume manufacturing test and getting the process flow set up so that Quanta can do final quality analysis (FQA). Activation of laptops (part of the anti-theft system) presented a problem since the FQA process pulls laptops after the final shipping image has been installed and security has been enabled. We decided that the best way to deal with FQA is to pull FQA machines prior to enabling security and then enable it as the final part of FQA.
7. Schedule: Friday was Feature Freeze Day for “Update.1.” At this point it is recommended that activity developers branch their builds—only high-priority fixes should be made to this branch—they can continue in development for future features on their mainline branch. In order to stabilize the Update.1 branch, we are asking that developers make recommendations about blocking or very-high-priority bugs; but no more code check-ins until they are confirmed with Jim Gettys or Kim Quirk.


7. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released firmware Q2D04 as a candidate for Update.1. It has wireless-networking improvements and bug fixes and can be used to update the NAND Flash ROM over the wireless network (from the school server).
8. Testing: Ricardo Carrano and Yani Galanis have been tracking down some issues associated with Access Point association, network manager, wireless drivers, and presence service. They continue to add to the knowledge base of how to debug and test in these areas (Please see [[Test_Network_Configuration]] and [[Test_Config_Notes]]).


Working with Javier Cardona, Mitch discovered the root cause on a wireless firmware problem that was breaking wireless support in Q2D03. There was a time window during which the module reported the wrong MAC address. This was not affecting the Linux driver because it had an arbitrary delay to block access during that gap. Marvell promises a proper fix in the next few days.
Alex Latham has developed a one-hour smoke/regression test that anyone can run as we begin testing of Update.1, which is scheduled to be out at the end of the month (See [[1_Hour_Smoke_Test]]). Please review and make comments (and start using it next week).


8. Wireless: Javier Cardona and Ricardo Carrano's efforts in debugging the open issues with the wireless subsystem are producing results. We now know the mechanism by which the driver fails (mishandling of a BUSY result returned from the firmware to a scan request); efforts are now focusing on finding the reason as to why that mishandling has such severe impact in the overall subsystem operation.
9. Sugar: Marco Pesenti Gritti spent most of the week on Update1 bug fixes. He fixed several regressions from Ship.1 (Trial-3); as a result, the Sugar core is getting back to a state of stability: the Totem video player is working again and mime-type handling is much improved. Journal previews are now generated reliably, but they are still too slow. Bernardo Innocenti is working on improved performance. Marco started looking into rainbow with Michael Stone to plan proper integration with Sugar for Update.1. Marco and Chris Ball started looking into the sound issues that crept into the Joyride builds—there was a race in the gstreamer code that prevents the device from being freed; a fix is in the build.


Marvell released wireless firmware version 5.110.20.p0 which incorporates many enhancements requested by OLPC, including mesh running-state control, mesh beacon control, and throughput optimizations. After resolving the existing issues, the Marvell team is going to mainly focus on power optimization for the firmware.
Reinier Heeres has joined the Sugar team as a three-month intern. He is the author of the Calculate activity in current builds. Marco helped Reinier to integrate with the team.


James Cameron tested the developer version of the active antennae (See [http://dev.laptop.org/~quozl/2007-11-10-active-antenna/]). The antennae performed easily over the range, no doubt aided by being
Tomeu Vizoso fixed some issues with special characters when copying entries to USB sticks (tickets #3498 and #4558: Mount removable devices as UTF8). He also implemented “expanding” of bundled journal entries. This will allow restoring individual entries from the backup in the school server and, in a future milestone, sharing entries between XOs (See [[Journal_entry_bundles]] for more details).
held at between 3m and 4m above ground. James reports that they hit the length limit of the test range before any significant bandwidth reduction was felt. We received the first 30 active antennae preproduction boards from QMI in Cambridge this week and completed a first round of testing without any issues.


9. Schedule update: There are only three weeks left to get the Update.1 release out the door. This week we focused on testing and some bug fixing; but not as many “Joyride” builds as lately—C. Scott Ananian has been concentrating on assembling the pieces for the first Update.1 builds. He expects that we will have this done over the weekend. The overarching goal for the Update.1 release is stability of the Trial-3 functionality; we are also folding in many new frameworks—such as security and the new tubes system; the goal is to have these frameworks in place without their causing regressions. One new feature we are are adding is robust upgrades, preferably via wireless network.
Tomeau also removed an active loop in the DataStore that had caused it to wake up every 2.5ms; eliminating this wake-up will help keep power consumption low. Tomeu improved the flushing strategy in the DataStore. We now flush either every 20 changes or one minute after the last unflushed change. This should prevent data loss in most cases, such as when the power goes off completely.


10. Testing: Ricardo has been detailing Ticket #4470—infrastructure mode failing over time—and assembling meaningful logs for the team to work with. Javier is going through these logs. Ricardo also finished installing network “sniffing” devices for our network testbed as part of the debug process. Ricardo and Yani Galanis tested the range of two laptops that were brought back from field-testing at the Khairat school in Munbai, India. Their tests revealed normal behavior. (In the field, they exhibited unusually poor WiFi range.) Ricardo and Yani have also been testing different antenna designs to establish long-distance wireless links.
Simon Schampijer continued to work on the Sugar control panel, which is now included in the latest builds (See [[Sugar_Control_Panel]] for details.)


Alex Latham has been testing Joyride, filing bug reports and uncovering the many regressions expected as we pull so many new bits together. He hasn’t yet completed a full “1-hour smoke test” with an of the Joyride builds—Scott’s Update.1 build series is expected to be more stable. Alex has also begun testing with security enabled. He also helped John Watlington set up a testbed for our mass-production hardware.
Some improvements have been made to the browser as well. The browser can now scale its contents. Simon introduced a view toolbar with buttons for zoom in and zoom out, full-screen, and and to hide or show the tray. Key bindings for zoom in (CTRL+) and zoom out (CTRL–) have been added as well. Walter Bender and Eben Eliason made a new activity as a derivative of the browser that launches Gmail directly from the taskbar. Other Google Apps may follow.


Manny Castillo has been testing the Browser activity with specific URLs chosen to exercise various plugins—such as Gnash—on Build 623; he will be testing with Joyride next week.
Chris Ball released a new version of Pippy, which has new examples, including Guess (from Pilar Saenz).


11. Sugar: Marco Gritti, Michael Stone, and Tomeu Vizoso worked on the integration of the Rainbow security system with Sugar and the DataStore (and Journal). They enabled activity isolation on Tuesday and solved all the known road blockers in the following days: access to
Muriel de Souza Godoi released a new version of the Memorize activity. This version allows children to create their own games, using text, pictures and audio from the Record activity, which are then saved in the Journal. When someone joins the activity, these data are copied into the Journal of the other XO using the author’s colors.
audio and video resources; communication with the DataStore; activity-space directories and their permission; and out-of-container activities. Next week we will need a new round of testing; Marco is confident that we will be able to solve the remaining problems quickly.


Marco rewrote the preview code to be much more efficient; it blocks for only the minimal required time. Switching between views and closing
Arjun Sarwal worked on the Measure activity with Cody Lodridge; they optimized the rendering code: the frame-rate and response time has improved significantly. This has largely been possible due to reduced calls to X for re-drawing the background in each frame update. Arjun also reintroduced the show values option, which displays the RMS and average values of the signal; and he fixed a bug that prevented Measure and Record from working together.
activities is now much faster and the previews are saved reliably. Marco temporarily disabled the startup sound in sugar to avoid blocking the sound device and tracked down the problem with muted audio at startup. Sound is expected to be finally back working fully in the next build.


Tomeu implement a basic search in the mesh view, which greatly facilitates finding people on a crowded network; he exposed files from the DataStore to activities using hard links instead of doing a copy; and he made the DataStore's use of the temporary file space more efficient.
Scott Ananian added AcousticMeasure, Wikibrowse, and Gmail activities to Joyride.


Reinier Heeres added a way to switch between activities using ALT-Tab; fixed some issues with left-right inversion for Arabic; disabled closing the Journal with CTRL-Q; and implemented a short-term solution to the problem of the “donut” on the home page not accurately reflecting activity memory usage. Reinier is working currently fixing some palette issues.
10. Presence service: Sjoerd Simons has been working on stabilizing (and freezing) the telepathy-salut chatroom/activity protocol, now officially named “Clique” (previously it didn't really have a name), for Update.1.


12. Activities: The Etoys team continues to make adjustments to the Sugar and Rainbow (security) system changes being introduced for Update.1; Bert Freudenberg is leading this effort. Yoshiki Ohshima and Bert have provided an improved version of Sugar menu bar; Yoshiki, Bert, and Scott Wallace put together the necessary bits to provide better “view source” experience—all of the code for Etoys can now be viewed without any degradation. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness have been improving the help system for Etoys. Takashi Yamamiya and korakurider have stabilized the localization mechanism. Takashi also experimented a different UI for controlling choices in tiles.
Simon McVittie made some related changes that will deliberately break compatibility with the multicast DNS announcements used in Ship.1 (Trial-3), so that Update.1 XOs will not be able to see Ship.1 activities, and Ship.1 XOs will not be able to see Update.1 activities. This is actually a a good thing: if you put an Update.1 XO and a Ship.1 XO in the same activity, the Ship.1 telepathy-salut would abort with an assertion failure whenever the Update.1 version sent messages, and the Update.1 telepathy-salut would be unable to understand messages sent by the Ship.1 version.


Simon Schampijer and Mark Maurer collaborated on getting “view source” working fluidly between the Browse and Write activities. By typing FN-Space (or CTRL+U) in Browse, the HTML source of the current page is opened in Write. The HTML can be edited in Write and when resumed from the Journal the modified page gets interpreted and displayed. While doing this work, they tracked down and fixed a new issue with the DataStore: it had been losing metadata between reboots.
Simon synchronized with Sjoerd's latest changes and it seems to work, so he has pushed it into Koji for Joyride inclusion. There are likely to be some issues to sort out early next week, but he thinks we're done with major changes—we do not plan to change the wire protocol again for the foreseeable future.


13. Builds: C. Scott Ananian continued to work on forking the new stable Update.1 branch and stabilizing our build process. He setup download.laptop.org, mock.laptop.org, and pilgrim.laptop.org, which you should see being pressed into use in the next week. Scott also updated the Libertas firmware in the builds and refreshed the mesh testbed, with an eye towards testing the new firmware in a realistic network upgrade scenario. He should be able to run that test on Monday.
Morgan Collett has been working on Presence Service reliability improvements, which track activities and Telepathy connection managers and recover from them crashing. Morgan also updated HelloMesh, the Tubes demo activity, incorporating Simon’s Sugar API improvements, which reduce the code necessary to set up Tubes. Activity authors should look at the changes in Connect and HelloMesh to see how they can reduce the existing code. (The old method will still work, so there is no urgency to update.)


This week Andres Salomon cleaned up the kernel build scripts, made them auto-generate change logs, and dealt with getting updated kernels into joyride. Joyride builds now include sane kernels. Andres also did minor Libertas testing, and is in the process of debugging USB issues.
Simon and Guillaume Desmottes worked on Stream Tubes, which implement TCP/IP over XMPP; Simon implemented this for the Read activity. Stream Tubes provide one-to-one connections that are much better for data transfer or streaming as opposed to the signal and method calls provided by D-Bus Tubes; Stream Tubes can be used in conjunction with D-Bus Tubes in an activity which needs both.


14. Power management: James Cameron and Chris Ball worked on some OHM (power manager) bugs. Once those were out of the way, Chris went on to implement some of our power management features: “suspend on idle” is in place; there is now a distinction between “suspend” (screen and wireless still on, wake up on network traffic or key press) and “sleep” (screen off, only wake up on a power-button press). There are a few more OHM bugs to fight before this is ready to land in Joyride/Update.1, which should happen sometime early next week.
11. X Window System: Bernie Innocenti has been restructuring our i18n (internationalization) and keyboard configuration scripts, along with the OLPC Display Manager (olpc-dm). There's still some work to do, but the resulting scheme is simpler, writes less to system files and, hopefully, also speeds up boot a little. Bernie has also been chasing a performance regression in taking screen shots for the Journal that slows us down when switching between activities. Walter Bender sent the [[OLPC_Nepal_Keyboard|Nepali keyboard]] out for review from the manufacturer; a [[Pashto_Keyboard|Pashto keyboard]] is being reviewed by the community; the [[Talk:OLPC_Nigeria_Keyboard|West African keyboard]] is also getting extensive review by Don Osborn, Paa Kwesi Imbeah, Dwayne Bailey, Adel El Zaim, and Albert Cahalan.


15. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta and Xavier Alvarez have successfully completed the first phase of the Pootle installation. All of the translation files are in place. A number of users have signed up and have already started to submit translations in the form of suggestions. A discussion in the #olpc-pootle channel on how to best integrate an external project's translation-related files into our Pootle setup has let to an improved workflow for external projects that want to take
12. Kernel: Andres Salomon spent Sunday through Tuesday hunting down a bizarre bug that turned out to be something in the kernel scheduler. He ran out of time for debugging, but signs were pointing to it being a vserver bug. The instability of the VServer kernel patches has made us remove this from our builds for Update.1. We will likely revisit use of light-weight containerization for security in future releases. We are pursuing alternate approaches to activity isolation for our first releases.
advantage of our translation infrastructure.


Currently, we have translators for the following languages signed up: Amharic, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (traditional), French, German, Greek, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish. Additional translators and languages are needed, particularly for the Indic languages, Quechua, and Aymara.
Andres also did some debugging of USB and DCON (display controller) code and attempted to reliably reproduce a Libertas transmit timeout bug. Chris Ball worked on OHM (Open Hardware Manager) to implement power management: results to follow.


The next stage of the Pootle deployment will consist of making the GIT integration work—we are waiting for GIT write access to dev.laptop.org to go forward on that. A set of frequently asked questions (FAQ) has been created in the wiki (See [[Pootle/FAQ]]).
13. New build system: We have established an independent build system for OLPC, that allows greater flexibility for testing builds. Scott Ananian spent time on Koji/mock integration work and discussions with the Fedora koji team. Scott created new Kernel/Xtest/Sugar/Rainbow branches for stabilization and testing of Joyride. Scott and John Palmieri released stable builds 623, and 624 to Quanta. for mass production. They pplied pilgrim patches to close or address numerous trac tickets: #4600, 4259, 4473, 3937, 4063, 2661, 4032, 3643, 3977, 2840, 4457, and 4400, among others. Scott also patched olpcrd with initial partition support.


Sayamindu has been looking at an issue where fontconfig seems to treat the font cache invalid if the mtime of the cache is greater than the system time. This is documented in Ticket #1525 (and in upstream Freedesktop bug #12107). Sayamindu had backported the relevant changes to the fontconfig used in Fedora 7; he will be testing out the package in the XO over the weekend.
Scott also helped Red Sox win the World Series by wearing clothing with appropriate logos and dressing his dog in same as well.


16. Security: Michael Stone announced a new release of Rainbow (See [http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=234221]) to the devel and sugar lists today. The release incorporates a number of resolutions to the current crop of 'rainbow-integration' bugs that the community has worked so hard over the last three days to document for us.
14. Wireless: We spent most of the week trying to consistently reproduce the wireless loss of functionality issue described in ticket #4470. The only consistent pattern that emerged is that newer builds expose the behavior more quickly and that there is a strong correlation with traffic volume (Michail Bletsas hasn't been able to reproduce the bug at home for the entire week). Given that the wireless firmware keeps running, the most probable cause is data-flow management in the Libertas driver. There was one patch submitted this week that fixes silent discard of frames by the driver that could also have an effect on the behavior seen in #4470. The other major blocking bug (#3341) is addressed by that fix and some firmware changes implemented in a private release to Scott, so that he can move on with his wireless update development.


Changes include:
QMI produced the first Active Antenna board samples and send them to OLPC for testing this week. Marvell is working on the firmware update tool on them that will be released the last week of November.
• relaxed multimedia-device permissions that should make it possible for activities to use the camera, microphone, and speakers;
• availability of the user's public key;
• activities are now started in $SUGAR_BUNDLE_PATH instead of
$SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT;
• activities can run under “strace” by defining the environment
variable RAINBOW_STRACE_LOG (in the dictionary passed to Rainbow in /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sugar/activity/activityfactory.py);
• tracebacks of your activity's log file can be viewed with “less -R” (e.g., less -R /home/olpc/.sugar/default/logs/org.laptop.Record-1.log);


Special thanks Marco, Tomeu, and Alex L. for their extraordinary efforts.
15. Suspend on idle CPU: John Gilmore has been exploring automatic suspend-on-idle; these issues have become a lot clearer in his mind, but it is still easy to get confused. You can join the discussion in the wiki (See [[Suspend_and_resume]]).


17. Community reporting: Dan Sutera and the team working on the Report activity made it to the next round of the Knight News Challenge. Pablo Flores is working on something similar in Uruguay, and has found some federal support to develop local blogs from children, stored at the local schools. We discussed how the projects could work together; Pablo is focusing on the web activity that would help editors arrange blog feeds into beautiful editions, and the Report team is working on an XO activity that would let children read and write blog and news feeds. Meanwhile, Jack Driscoll, former editor of the ''Boston Globe''—who has been leading community journalism projects around the world for over ten years—has put some journalism guidelines in the wiki (See [[Learning_activities/Journalism]]).
16. Localization: Xavier Alverez and Alfonso de la Guarda have established a Pootle server for localization of Sugar, activities, and other OLPC-related localization needs. Sayamindu Dasgupta is working with them. They are making good progress, but could use as much help as they can get (See [http://solar.laptop.org:5080/projects/xo_core/]). Support your favorite language now!


18. SimCity: SimCity is now available under the GPL, thanks to the generosity of EA and the hard work of Steve Seabolt and Chuck Normann, John Gilmore, and Don Hopkins (See [[SimCity]]). The game is in the process of being “sugarized”, but is already playable on the XO. This is the first time that a major publisher has open sourced the original of a popular title. EA should be congratulated.
17. Security: Ivan Krstić and Michael Stone gave a heads up to activity developers that we will be landing portions of our security system for Update.1. We will be requiring: (1) file-path compliance; (2) a cryptographic signature; and (3) a permissions declaration.


19. Game Jams: A competitive game jam is under way this weekend in São Carlos, Brazil, with the support of a number of local universities and sponsors. Any who are interested in their progress are welcome to follow along in #olpc-content on IRC; they are looking for outside help with art and music for the developed games (See [[Game_Jam_Brazil]]). In advance of the CMU game jam next weekend, the ETC team at Carnegie Mellon university has finished a draft of its first game, a peg solitaire affair (See [http://www.olpcgames.org/]).
File-path compliance means that you must ensure your activity does not write to any path outside of that contained in the environment variable SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT; specifically subdirectories called “data,” “conf,” and “tmp” within the SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT directory. (We are working with the Sugar team to provide helper functions for easily getting those three directory paths for those of you using Python. Until then, please depend on the environment variable directly.)


20. Community: A discussion with Greg DeKoenigsberg about how to involve more Fedora developers in OLPC work led to some work on improving test and review processes for activities and bundles (See [[Activity_Testing_Project]]).
Please note that if you are using the DataStore for your file I/O, you still must write the file somewhere before asking the DataStore to check it in; if you choose a temporary filename that's outside of SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT, you will be non-compliant.

File path compliance is a requirement for inclusion in Update.1. Please do your best to make sure you are not writing to paths outside of SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT; we'll try to help you catch any such writes that you miss.

We will be posting more details regarding cryptographic signatures and permissions declarations—these will be required in near future. As a summary, when we say signatures, we mean that you as the activity authors will use a set of tools we provide to make your own keys and sign your activities; the purpose of this is simply to allow secure activity upgrades once they are on the machines. Permission declarations will enumerate which special permissions (camera access? microphone access? non-Tubes network access? etc.) your activity may need for its normal operation.


=More News=
=More News=

Revision as of 19:53, 10 November 2007

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Laptop News 2007-11-10

1. Cambridge: The first of the monthly learning workshops was held at OLPC this week. More than 60 people from 14 countries (and one US city) attended. The focus of this workshop was to build a stronger understanding of laptops and learning; to make plans for deployment in the countries; and to build a strong community among the participants for ongoing support and collaboration. The energy, ideas, and excitement among the group was fantastic and gave everyone more hope about the learning potential about to be unleashed as laptops begin arriving in large numbers in countries shortly. Many thanks to David Cavallo, Lindsay Petrillose, and the OLPC learning team for all of their efforts.

2. Cyberspace: Larry Weber’s dream of a digital PSA has been realized: Hilary Meserole reports that our first Give One Get One public service announcement, which features Heroes star Masi Oka, is online (See [1]). The team is working with YouTube on ways to feature this on their home page during the fortnight that the campaign is running. We will be adding more content next week—outtakes from the PSA shoot, etc.

Masi has joined OLPC as our media spokesperson, however, an ill-timed writers' strike precludes Nicholas and Masi doing some of the talk-show appearances that had been envisioned.

3. Give One Get One launches at 6AM EST on Monday (See laptopgiving.org). While we have no idea what the response will be, Hilary and the “volunteer army” that includes Pentagram, Nurun, W2, Racepoint, Digital Influence Group, Eleven, Inc., and Len Fink did a fantastic job raising the public awareness of the campaign. Examples include the beautiful full-page ad that was donated by the Economist (See Image:GiveOneGetOne.pdf). We will be able to reach many more children due to their efforts.

4. Mass production started this week this week in Quanta's new factory in Changshu. We would like to take this time to thank the team at Quanta for there support over the last two years. Major contributors to the effort include: Victor Chao, Gary Chiang, Arnold Kao, Matt Huang, Dandy Hsu, Agnes Huang, Johnson Huang, Frank Lee, Roger Huang, Elvis Wu, S.F. Chen, Ken Lin, Jacky Mu, Paying Liu, Terry Su, Alfred Lin, Gary Chiang, Alice Wang, Alan Lio, Jeff Tarng, Tim Huang, Jeffrey Huang, Rita Chen, Joe Lin, Jeff Yu, Ben Chuang, Sam Yeh, Johnnie Lui, Eric Tasi, Bruce Lu, Jeff Huang, Mikko Hsu, Vance Ke, Luna Huang, David Lin, Bryan Ma, Devin Lui, Arvin Lui, John Lin, Tess Yu, Chia Ying Lin, Gary Su, C.H. Yang, Ray Tseng, Sam Chang, Gary Liu, Lori Yang, Frank Feng, Cooper Zhou, Kaiser Feng, Neptune Zhan, Xiang Wei, Zihaw Zhang, Min Xia, Eagle Liang, Peter Huang, Pillar Hou, Yaya Zhang, Crystal Sun, Nana Pei, Bob Zhang, Yengeng Cen, Ian Huang, Chie-Hung Li, Sunny Cheng, Cancer Zha, Fly Chen, Javin Hu, Grubby Wei, Polin Chang, Anna Zhou, Tim Huang, Jim Chang, Eric Wang, Kenny Chung, Zenith Zhu, Rock Chien, Sunny Hsiung, Kiki Peng, Sunny Huang, Barry Lam, Michael Wang, Morse Chen, and Eddy Chao.

There are many other people—from companies such as Marvel, ChiLin, Himax, CMO, AMD, ENE, QMI, Fuse Project, Gecko, Pentagram, Design Continuum, Foxconn, ALPS, and MIT, and many individuals as well—who have contributed to the hardware and mechanicals over the past three years. (Mary Lou Jepsen is pulling together a list of everyone to thank.) Collectively we have achieved something that just three years ago many believed that was an impossible dream.

5. Safety Certification: Behind the scenes another team (from UL, Quanta, and OLPC) has been quietly working for nearly two years on XO safety certification. The XO laptop is now fully compliant with UL safety requirements and has been thus certified. We have also been awarded radio, power, and system certification at national levels in several countries. We can now legally ship in US, Canada, Uruguay, and Peru, as well as many other countries. EU-wide approval is due in approximately a week. We are still in the process of applying for certification in countries on each continent with the most stringent safety standards.

Among many tests, we have passed Ul/IEC 60950-1 (notebook computer), ASTM F693 (electronic toys for children), UL 1301 (mechanical assembly requirements, including larger face dimension requirements for child safety) and UL 2054 (batteries), as well as a passing UL on-site inspection of the Quanta's factory. We have formal RoHS (low toxicity) certification from Quanta, and independent testing of RoHS compliance by UL. Also, we have been safety approved for lap use—XO is the first “laptop” approved for usage on one's lap in many years. (The reason that most laptops are now called “notebook computers” is that they run too hot for safe lap use.)

Many thanks to the core XO safety teams from UL, Quanta, and OLPC: Katherine Sims, Bob Delisi, Nicole Tatum, Kevin Ravi, Stacy Yu, Tom Burke, Derek Chen, Edgar Wolff-klammer, Tammi Gengegbacher, Greg Monty, Alfred Fung, Nicholas Boten, Seth Carlton, Bruce Lu, Kenny Chung, Victor Chao, Rita Chen, Arnold Kao, Mary Lou Jepsen, and Lindsay Petrillose.

6. Richard Smith has been setting up a suspend/resume manufacturing test and getting the process flow set up so that Quanta can do final quality analysis (FQA). Activation of laptops (part of the anti-theft system) presented a problem since the FQA process pulls laptops after the final shipping image has been installed and security has been enabled. We decided that the best way to deal with FQA is to pull FQA machines prior to enabling security and then enable it as the final part of FQA.

7. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released firmware Q2D04 as a candidate for Update.1. It has wireless-networking improvements and bug fixes and can be used to update the NAND Flash ROM over the wireless network (from the school server).

Working with Javier Cardona, Mitch discovered the root cause on a wireless firmware problem that was breaking wireless support in Q2D03. There was a time window during which the module reported the wrong MAC address. This was not affecting the Linux driver because it had an arbitrary delay to block access during that gap. Marvell promises a proper fix in the next few days.

8. Wireless: Javier Cardona and Ricardo Carrano's efforts in debugging the open issues with the wireless subsystem are producing results. We now know the mechanism by which the driver fails (mishandling of a BUSY result returned from the firmware to a scan request); efforts are now focusing on finding the reason as to why that mishandling has such severe impact in the overall subsystem operation.

Marvell released wireless firmware version 5.110.20.p0 which incorporates many enhancements requested by OLPC, including mesh running-state control, mesh beacon control, and throughput optimizations. After resolving the existing issues, the Marvell team is going to mainly focus on power optimization for the firmware.

James Cameron tested the developer version of the active antennae (See [2]). The antennae performed easily over the range, no doubt aided by being held at between 3m and 4m above ground. James reports that they hit the length limit of the test range before any significant bandwidth reduction was felt. We received the first 30 active antennae preproduction boards from QMI in Cambridge this week and completed a first round of testing without any issues.

9. Schedule update: There are only three weeks left to get the Update.1 release out the door. This week we focused on testing and some bug fixing; but not as many “Joyride” builds as lately—C. Scott Ananian has been concentrating on assembling the pieces for the first Update.1 builds. He expects that we will have this done over the weekend. The overarching goal for the Update.1 release is stability of the Trial-3 functionality; we are also folding in many new frameworks—such as security and the new tubes system; the goal is to have these frameworks in place without their causing regressions. One new feature we are are adding is robust upgrades, preferably via wireless network.

10. Testing: Ricardo has been detailing Ticket #4470—infrastructure mode failing over time—and assembling meaningful logs for the team to work with. Javier is going through these logs. Ricardo also finished installing network “sniffing” devices for our network testbed as part of the debug process. Ricardo and Yani Galanis tested the range of two laptops that were brought back from field-testing at the Khairat school in Munbai, India. Their tests revealed normal behavior. (In the field, they exhibited unusually poor WiFi range.) Ricardo and Yani have also been testing different antenna designs to establish long-distance wireless links.

Alex Latham has been testing Joyride, filing bug reports and uncovering the many regressions expected as we pull so many new bits together. He hasn’t yet completed a full “1-hour smoke test” with an of the Joyride builds—Scott’s Update.1 build series is expected to be more stable. Alex has also begun testing with security enabled. He also helped John Watlington set up a testbed for our mass-production hardware.

Manny Castillo has been testing the Browser activity with specific URLs chosen to exercise various plugins—such as Gnash—on Build 623; he will be testing with Joyride next week.

11. Sugar: Marco Gritti, Michael Stone, and Tomeu Vizoso worked on the integration of the Rainbow security system with Sugar and the DataStore (and Journal). They enabled activity isolation on Tuesday and solved all the known road blockers in the following days: access to audio and video resources; communication with the DataStore; activity-space directories and their permission; and out-of-container activities. Next week we will need a new round of testing; Marco is confident that we will be able to solve the remaining problems quickly.

Marco rewrote the preview code to be much more efficient; it blocks for only the minimal required time. Switching between views and closing activities is now much faster and the previews are saved reliably. Marco temporarily disabled the startup sound in sugar to avoid blocking the sound device and tracked down the problem with muted audio at startup. Sound is expected to be finally back working fully in the next build.

Tomeu implement a basic search in the mesh view, which greatly facilitates finding people on a crowded network; he exposed files from the DataStore to activities using hard links instead of doing a copy; and he made the DataStore's use of the temporary file space more efficient.

Reinier Heeres added a way to switch between activities using ALT-Tab; fixed some issues with left-right inversion for Arabic; disabled closing the Journal with CTRL-Q; and implemented a short-term solution to the problem of the “donut” on the home page not accurately reflecting activity memory usage. Reinier is working currently fixing some palette issues.

12. Activities: The Etoys team continues to make adjustments to the Sugar and Rainbow (security) system changes being introduced for Update.1; Bert Freudenberg is leading this effort. Yoshiki Ohshima and Bert have provided an improved version of Sugar menu bar; Yoshiki, Bert, and Scott Wallace put together the necessary bits to provide better “view source” experience—all of the code for Etoys can now be viewed without any degradation. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness have been improving the help system for Etoys. Takashi Yamamiya and korakurider have stabilized the localization mechanism. Takashi also experimented a different UI for controlling choices in tiles.

Simon Schampijer and Mark Maurer collaborated on getting “view source” working fluidly between the Browse and Write activities. By typing FN-Space (or CTRL+U) in Browse, the HTML source of the current page is opened in Write. The HTML can be edited in Write and when resumed from the Journal the modified page gets interpreted and displayed. While doing this work, they tracked down and fixed a new issue with the DataStore: it had been losing metadata between reboots.

13. Builds: C. Scott Ananian continued to work on forking the new stable Update.1 branch and stabilizing our build process. He setup download.laptop.org, mock.laptop.org, and pilgrim.laptop.org, which you should see being pressed into use in the next week. Scott also updated the Libertas firmware in the builds and refreshed the mesh testbed, with an eye towards testing the new firmware in a realistic network upgrade scenario. He should be able to run that test on Monday.

This week Andres Salomon cleaned up the kernel build scripts, made them auto-generate change logs, and dealt with getting updated kernels into joyride. Joyride builds now include sane kernels. Andres also did minor Libertas testing, and is in the process of debugging USB issues.

14. Power management: James Cameron and Chris Ball worked on some OHM (power manager) bugs. Once those were out of the way, Chris went on to implement some of our power management features: “suspend on idle” is in place; there is now a distinction between “suspend” (screen and wireless still on, wake up on network traffic or key press) and “sleep” (screen off, only wake up on a power-button press). There are a few more OHM bugs to fight before this is ready to land in Joyride/Update.1, which should happen sometime early next week.

15. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta and Xavier Alvarez have successfully completed the first phase of the Pootle installation. All of the translation files are in place. A number of users have signed up and have already started to submit translations in the form of suggestions. A discussion in the #olpc-pootle channel on how to best integrate an external project's translation-related files into our Pootle setup has let to an improved workflow for external projects that want to take advantage of our translation infrastructure.

Currently, we have translators for the following languages signed up: Amharic, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (traditional), French, German, Greek, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish. Additional translators and languages are needed, particularly for the Indic languages, Quechua, and Aymara.

The next stage of the Pootle deployment will consist of making the GIT integration work—we are waiting for GIT write access to dev.laptop.org to go forward on that. A set of frequently asked questions (FAQ) has been created in the wiki (See Pootle/FAQ).

Sayamindu has been looking at an issue where fontconfig seems to treat the font cache invalid if the mtime of the cache is greater than the system time. This is documented in Ticket #1525 (and in upstream Freedesktop bug #12107). Sayamindu had backported the relevant changes to the fontconfig used in Fedora 7; he will be testing out the package in the XO over the weekend.

16. Security: Michael Stone announced a new release of Rainbow (See [3]) to the devel and sugar lists today. The release incorporates a number of resolutions to the current crop of 'rainbow-integration' bugs that the community has worked so hard over the last three days to document for us.

Changes include: 

• relaxed multimedia-device permissions that should make it possible for activities to use the camera, microphone, and speakers;
• availability of the user's public key;
• activities are now started in $SUGAR_BUNDLE_PATH instead of
$SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT;
• activities can run under “strace” by defining the environment
variable RAINBOW_STRACE_LOG (in the dictionary passed to Rainbow in /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sugar/activity/activityfactory.py);
• tracebacks of your activity's log file can be viewed with “less -R” (e.g., less -R /home/olpc/.sugar/default/logs/org.laptop.Record-1.log);

Special thanks Marco, Tomeu, and Alex L. for their extraordinary efforts.

17. Community reporting: Dan Sutera and the team working on the Report activity made it to the next round of the Knight News Challenge. Pablo Flores is working on something similar in Uruguay, and has found some federal support to develop local blogs from children, stored at the local schools. We discussed how the projects could work together; Pablo is focusing on the web activity that would help editors arrange blog feeds into beautiful editions, and the Report team is working on an XO activity that would let children read and write blog and news feeds. Meanwhile, Jack Driscoll, former editor of the Boston Globe—who has been leading community journalism projects around the world for over ten years—has put some journalism guidelines in the wiki (See Learning_activities/Journalism).

18. SimCity: SimCity is now available under the GPL, thanks to the generosity of EA and the hard work of Steve Seabolt and Chuck Normann, John Gilmore, and Don Hopkins (See SimCity). The game is in the process of being “sugarized”, but is already playable on the XO. This is the first time that a major publisher has open sourced the original of a popular title. EA should be congratulated.

19. Game Jams: A competitive game jam is under way this weekend in São Carlos, Brazil, with the support of a number of local universities and sponsors. Any who are interested in their progress are welcome to follow along in #olpc-content on IRC; they are looking for outside help with art and music for the developed games (See Game_Jam_Brazil). In advance of the CMU game jam next weekend, the ETC team at Carnegie Mellon university has finished a draft of its first game, a peg solitaire affair (See [4]).

20. Community: A discussion with Greg DeKoenigsberg about how to involve more Fedora developers in OLPC work led to some work on improving test and review processes for activities and bundles (See Activity_Testing_Project).

More News

Laptop News is archived here and here.

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Press requests: please send email to press@racepointgroup.com

Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

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You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site.

Laptop News 2007-11-10

1. Cambridge: The first of the monthly learning workshops was held at OLPC this week. More than 60 people from 14 countries (and one US city) attended. The focus of this workshop was to build a stronger understanding of laptops and learning; to make plans for deployment in the countries; and to build a strong community among the participants for ongoing support and collaboration. The energy, ideas, and excitement among the group was fantastic and gave everyone more hope about the learning potential about to be unleashed as laptops begin arriving in large numbers in countries shortly. Many thanks to David Cavallo, Lindsay Petrillose, and the OLPC learning team for all of their efforts.

2. Cyberspace: Larry Weber’s dream of a digital PSA has been realized: Hilary Meserole reports that our first Give One Get One public service announcement, which features Heroes star Masi Oka, is online (See [5]). The team is working with YouTube on ways to feature this on their home page during the fortnight that the campaign is running. We will be adding more content next week—outtakes from the PSA shoot, etc.

Masi has joined OLPC as our media spokesperson, however, an ill-timed writers' strike precludes Nicholas and Masi doing some of the talk-show appearances that had been envisioned.

3. Give One Get One launches at 6AM EST on Monday (See laptopgiving.org). While we have no idea what the response will be, Hilary and the “volunteer army” that includes Pentagram, Nurun, W2, Racepoint, Digital Influence Group, Eleven, Inc., and Len Fink did a fantastic job raising the public awareness of the campaign. Examples include the beautiful full-page ad that was donated by the Economist (See Image:GiveOneGetOne.pdf). We will be able to reach many more children due to their efforts.

4. Mass production started this week this week in Quanta's new factory in Changshu. We would like to take this time to thank the team at Quanta for there support over the last two years. Major contributors to the effort include: Victor Chao, Gary Chiang, Arnold Kao, Matt Huang, Dandy Hsu, Agnes Huang, Johnson Huang, Frank Lee, Roger Huang, Elvis Wu, S.F. Chen, Ken Lin, Jacky Mu, Paying Liu, Terry Su, Alfred Lin, Gary Chiang, Alice Wang, Alan Lio, Jeff Tarng, Tim Huang, Jeffrey Huang, Rita Chen, Joe Lin, Jeff Yu, Ben Chuang, Sam Yeh, Johnnie Lui, Eric Tasi, Bruce Lu, Jeff Huang, Mikko Hsu, Vance Ke, Luna Huang, David Lin, Bryan Ma, Devin Lui, Arvin Lui, John Lin, Tess Yu, Chia Ying Lin, Gary Su, C.H. Yang, Ray Tseng, Sam Chang, Gary Liu, Lori Yang, Frank Feng, Cooper Zhou, Kaiser Feng, Neptune Zhan, Xiang Wei, Zihaw Zhang, Min Xia, Eagle Liang, Peter Huang, Pillar Hou, Yaya Zhang, Crystal Sun, Nana Pei, Bob Zhang, Yengeng Cen, Ian Huang, Chie-Hung Li, Sunny Cheng, Cancer Zha, Fly Chen, Javin Hu, Grubby Wei, Polin Chang, Anna Zhou, Tim Huang, Jim Chang, Eric Wang, Kenny Chung, Zenith Zhu, Rock Chien, Sunny Hsiung, Kiki Peng, Sunny Huang, Barry Lam, Michael Wang, Morse Chen, and Eddy Chao.

There are many other people—from companies such as Marvel, ChiLin, Himax, CMO, AMD, ENE, QMI, Fuse Project, Gecko, Pentagram, Design Continuum, Foxconn, ALPS, and MIT, and many individuals as well—who have contributed to the hardware and mechanicals over the past three years. (Mary Lou Jepsen is pulling together a list of everyone to thank.) Collectively we have achieved something that just three years ago many believed that was an impossible dream.

5. Safety Certification: Behind the scenes another team (from UL, Quanta, and OLPC) has been quietly working for nearly two years on XO safety certification. The XO laptop is now fully compliant with UL safety requirements and has been thus certified. We have also been awarded radio, power, and system certification at national levels in several countries. We can now legally ship in US, Canada, Uruguay, and Peru, as well as many other countries. EU-wide approval is due in approximately a week. We are still in the process of applying for certification in countries on each continent with the most stringent safety standards.

Among many tests, we have passed Ul/IEC 60950-1 (notebook computer), ASTM F693 (electronic toys for children), UL 1301 (mechanical assembly requirements, including larger face dimension requirements for child safety) and UL 2054 (batteries), as well as a passing UL on-site inspection of the Quanta's factory. We have formal RoHS (low toxicity) certification from Quanta, and independent testing of RoHS compliance by UL. Also, we have been safety approved for lap use—XO is the first “laptop” approved for usage on one's lap in many years. (The reason that most laptops are now called “notebook computers” is that they run too hot for safe lap use.)

Many thanks to the core XO safety teams from UL, Quanta, and OLPC: Katherine Sims, Bob Delisi, Nicole Tatum, Kevin Ravi, Stacy Yu, Tom Burke, Derek Chen, Edgar Wolff-klammer, Tammi Gengegbacher, Greg Monty, Alfred Fung, Nicholas Boten, Seth Carlton, Bruce Lu, Kenny Chung, Victor Chao, Rita Chen, Arnold Kao, Mary Lou Jepsen, and Lindsay Petrillose.

6. Richard Smith has been setting up a suspend/resume manufacturing test and getting the process flow set up so that Quanta can do final quality analysis (FQA). Activation of laptops (part of the anti-theft system) presented a problem since the FQA process pulls laptops after the final shipping image has been installed and security has been enabled. We decided that the best way to deal with FQA is to pull FQA machines prior to enabling security and then enable it as the final part of FQA.

7. Firmware: Mitch Bradley released firmware Q2D04 as a candidate for Update.1. It has wireless-networking improvements and bug fixes and can be used to update the NAND Flash ROM over the wireless network (from the school server).

Working with Javier Cardona, Mitch discovered the root cause on a wireless firmware problem that was breaking wireless support in Q2D03. There was a time window during which the module reported the wrong MAC address. This was not affecting the Linux driver because it had an arbitrary delay to block access during that gap. Marvell promises a proper fix in the next few days.

8. Wireless: Javier Cardona and Ricardo Carrano's efforts in debugging the open issues with the wireless subsystem are producing results. We now know the mechanism by which the driver fails (mishandling of a BUSY result returned from the firmware to a scan request); efforts are now focusing on finding the reason as to why that mishandling has such severe impact in the overall subsystem operation.

Marvell released wireless firmware version 5.110.20.p0 which incorporates many enhancements requested by OLPC, including mesh running-state control, mesh beacon control, and throughput optimizations. After resolving the existing issues, the Marvell team is going to mainly focus on power optimization for the firmware.

James Cameron tested the developer version of the active antennae (See [6]). The antennae performed easily over the range, no doubt aided by being held at between 3m and 4m above ground. James reports that they hit the length limit of the test range before any significant bandwidth reduction was felt. We received the first 30 active antennae preproduction boards from QMI in Cambridge this week and completed a first round of testing without any issues.

9. Schedule update: There are only three weeks left to get the Update.1 release out the door. This week we focused on testing and some bug fixing; but not as many “Joyride” builds as lately—C. Scott Ananian has been concentrating on assembling the pieces for the first Update.1 builds. He expects that we will have this done over the weekend. The overarching goal for the Update.1 release is stability of the Trial-3 functionality; we are also folding in many new frameworks—such as security and the new tubes system; the goal is to have these frameworks in place without their causing regressions. One new feature we are are adding is robust upgrades, preferably via wireless network.

10. Testing: Ricardo has been detailing Ticket #4470—infrastructure mode failing over time—and assembling meaningful logs for the team to work with. Javier is going through these logs. Ricardo also finished installing network “sniffing” devices for our network testbed as part of the debug process. Ricardo and Yani Galanis tested the range of two laptops that were brought back from field-testing at the Khairat school in Munbai, India. Their tests revealed normal behavior. (In the field, they exhibited unusually poor WiFi range.) Ricardo and Yani have also been testing different antenna designs to establish long-distance wireless links.

Alex Latham has been testing Joyride, filing bug reports and uncovering the many regressions expected as we pull so many new bits together. He hasn’t yet completed a full “1-hour smoke test” with an of the Joyride builds—Scott’s Update.1 build series is expected to be more stable. Alex has also begun testing with security enabled. He also helped John Watlington set up a testbed for our mass-production hardware.

Manny Castillo has been testing the Browser activity with specific URLs chosen to exercise various plugins—such as Gnash—on Build 623; he will be testing with Joyride next week.

11. Sugar: Marco Gritti, Michael Stone, and Tomeu Vizoso worked on the integration of the Rainbow security system with Sugar and the DataStore (and Journal). They enabled activity isolation on Tuesday and solved all the known road blockers in the following days: access to audio and video resources; communication with the DataStore; activity-space directories and their permission; and out-of-container activities. Next week we will need a new round of testing; Marco is confident that we will be able to solve the remaining problems quickly.

Marco rewrote the preview code to be much more efficient; it blocks for only the minimal required time. Switching between views and closing activities is now much faster and the previews are saved reliably. Marco temporarily disabled the startup sound in sugar to avoid blocking the sound device and tracked down the problem with muted audio at startup. Sound is expected to be finally back working fully in the next build.

Tomeu implement a basic search in the mesh view, which greatly facilitates finding people on a crowded network; he exposed files from the DataStore to activities using hard links instead of doing a copy; and he made the DataStore's use of the temporary file space more efficient.

Reinier Heeres added a way to switch between activities using ALT-Tab; fixed some issues with left-right inversion for Arabic; disabled closing the Journal with CTRL-Q; and implemented a short-term solution to the problem of the “donut” on the home page not accurately reflecting activity memory usage. Reinier is working currently fixing some palette issues.

12. Activities: The Etoys team continues to make adjustments to the Sugar and Rainbow (security) system changes being introduced for Update.1; Bert Freudenberg is leading this effort. Yoshiki Ohshima and Bert have provided an improved version of Sugar menu bar; Yoshiki, Bert, and Scott Wallace put together the necessary bits to provide better “view source” experience—all of the code for Etoys can now be viewed without any degradation. Ted Kaehler and Kathleen Harness have been improving the help system for Etoys. Takashi Yamamiya and korakurider have stabilized the localization mechanism. Takashi also experimented a different UI for controlling choices in tiles.

Simon Schampijer and Mark Maurer collaborated on getting “view source” working fluidly between the Browse and Write activities. By typing FN-Space (or CTRL+U) in Browse, the HTML source of the current page is opened in Write. The HTML can be edited in Write and when resumed from the Journal the modified page gets interpreted and displayed. While doing this work, they tracked down and fixed a new issue with the DataStore: it had been losing metadata between reboots.

13. Builds: C. Scott Ananian continued to work on forking the new stable Update.1 branch and stabilizing our build process. He setup download.laptop.org, mock.laptop.org, and pilgrim.laptop.org, which you should see being pressed into use in the next week. Scott also updated the Libertas firmware in the builds and refreshed the mesh testbed, with an eye towards testing the new firmware in a realistic network upgrade scenario. He should be able to run that test on Monday.

This week Andres Salomon cleaned up the kernel build scripts, made them auto-generate change logs, and dealt with getting updated kernels into joyride. Joyride builds now include sane kernels. Andres also did minor Libertas testing, and is in the process of debugging USB issues.

14. Power management: James Cameron and Chris Ball worked on some OHM (power manager) bugs. Once those were out of the way, Chris went on to implement some of our power management features: “suspend on idle” is in place; there is now a distinction between “suspend” (screen and wireless still on, wake up on network traffic or key press) and “sleep” (screen off, only wake up on a power-button press). There are a few more OHM bugs to fight before this is ready to land in Joyride/Update.1, which should happen sometime early next week.

15. Localization: Sayamindu Dasgupta and Xavier Alvarez have successfully completed the first phase of the Pootle installation. All of the translation files are in place. A number of users have signed up and have already started to submit translations in the form of suggestions. A discussion in the #olpc-pootle channel on how to best integrate an external project's translation-related files into our Pootle setup has let to an improved workflow for external projects that want to take advantage of our translation infrastructure.

Currently, we have translators for the following languages signed up: Amharic, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (traditional), French, German, Greek, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Spanish. Additional translators and languages are needed, particularly for the Indic languages, Quechua, and Aymara.

The next stage of the Pootle deployment will consist of making the GIT integration work—we are waiting for GIT write access to dev.laptop.org to go forward on that. A set of frequently asked questions (FAQ) has been created in the wiki (See Pootle/FAQ).

Sayamindu has been looking at an issue where fontconfig seems to treat the font cache invalid if the mtime of the cache is greater than the system time. This is documented in Ticket #1525 (and in upstream Freedesktop bug #12107). Sayamindu had backported the relevant changes to the fontconfig used in Fedora 7; he will be testing out the package in the XO over the weekend.

16. Security: Michael Stone announced a new release of Rainbow (See [7]) to the devel and sugar lists today. The release incorporates a number of resolutions to the current crop of 'rainbow-integration' bugs that the community has worked so hard over the last three days to document for us.

Changes include: 

• relaxed multimedia-device permissions that should make it possible for activities to use the camera, microphone, and speakers;
• availability of the user's public key;
• activities are now started in $SUGAR_BUNDLE_PATH instead of
$SUGAR_ACTIVITY_ROOT;
• activities can run under “strace” by defining the environment
variable RAINBOW_STRACE_LOG (in the dictionary passed to Rainbow in /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/sugar/activity/activityfactory.py);
• tracebacks of your activity's log file can be viewed with “less -R” (e.g., less -R /home/olpc/.sugar/default/logs/org.laptop.Record-1.log);

Special thanks Marco, Tomeu, and Alex L. for their extraordinary efforts.

17. Community reporting: Dan Sutera and the team working on the Report activity made it to the next round of the Knight News Challenge. Pablo Flores is working on something similar in Uruguay, and has found some federal support to develop local blogs from children, stored at the local schools. We discussed how the projects could work together; Pablo is focusing on the web activity that would help editors arrange blog feeds into beautiful editions, and the Report team is working on an XO activity that would let children read and write blog and news feeds. Meanwhile, Jack Driscoll, former editor of the Boston Globe—who has been leading community journalism projects around the world for over ten years—has put some journalism guidelines in the wiki (See Learning_activities/Journalism).

18. SimCity: SimCity is now available under the GPL, thanks to the generosity of EA and the hard work of Steve Seabolt and Chuck Normann, John Gilmore, and Don Hopkins (See SimCity). The game is in the process of being “sugarized”, but is already playable on the XO. This is the first time that a major publisher has open sourced the original of a popular title. EA should be congratulated.

19. Game Jams: A competitive game jam is under way this weekend in São Carlos, Brazil, with the support of a number of local universities and sponsors. Any who are interested in their progress are welcome to follow along in #olpc-content on IRC; they are looking for outside help with art and music for the developed games (See Game_Jam_Brazil). In advance of the CMU game jam next weekend, the ETC team at Carnegie Mellon university has finished a draft of its first game, a peg solitaire affair (See [8]).

20. Community: A discussion with Greg DeKoenigsberg about how to involve more Fedora developers in OLPC work led to some work on improving test and review processes for activities and bundles (See Activity_Testing_Project).

More News

Laptop News is archived here and here.

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Milestones

Latest milestones:

Nov. 2007 Mass Production has started.
July. 2007 One Laptop per Child Announces Final Beta Version of its Revolutionary XO Laptop.
Apr. 2007 First pre-B3 machines built.
Mar. 2007 First mesh network deployment.
Feb. 2007 B2-test machines become available and are shipped to developers and the launch countries.
Jan. 2007 Rwanda announced its participation in the project.

All milestones can be found here.


Press

You can subscribe to the OLPC community-news mailing list by visiting the laptop.org mailman site. Template loop detected: Press More articles can be found here.

Video

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Video

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